The Good Funeral Guide Blog

Materialism gone mad and the what’s-it-all-about question

Here’s an interesting piece by Peter Popham in the Independent, first published in May. I’ve only just found it.

He begins by talking about Christopher Hitchens, who has oesophageal cancer, and how impending death has reconfigured his identity:

“…when the bitter laughter dies away, there is Hitch, locked away from healthy us, in a land where, he discovers, the powers of argument and invective that have made him so widely loved and feared and admired are no longer of any relevance.

“That will be a massive but passing frustration for him, because he has other, more weighty problems on his plate. But it should be a matter of reflection for the rest of us, because we have made of Hitch a modern sage, one of the people we turn to to put us right about things. And suddenly, with death breathing down his neck, what he has to say is of no use to him, and is no use to us, either. He has failed us, and in his blunt way he comes clean about the fact. We treated him like a wise man, but it turns out he was just a clown.”

Which brings him to his point:

“Death is a problem for our age as it was not for ages past, precisely because (speaking of the non-religious majority) we behave as if it were a problem we had already solved.”

But we haven’t, of course.

“Church-goers are confronted week in week out with images of agonising death, talk of the “mystery” of death, exhortations to prepare for it, prayers for those approaching it … But in spurning all that we also spare ourselves the weekly dousing in the fact of mortality. And this allows us to go through life as children and animals do, giving the ugly fact that we won’t be here very much longer only the occasional fleeting glance. Then comes the stroke, the aneurysm…”

He then considers those unbelievers and atheists who confront their own demise with equanimity and courage,

“who face the fact of their dying calmly and soberly and treat the disposal of their own life as if it were merely another item in the will … But there is a delusion at the heart of this activity … And the delusion lies in believing that the self is a fixed, unchanging entity, while one’s life is something distinct and separate from it which we can enjoy like an ice cream when it is in good shape but may discard like poison when it turns bitter.”

He quotes the example of a woman who tried to kill herself rather than suffer a long and horrible death. She failed. Popham draws this conclusion:

“Her error lay in having arrived at a commodified view of life, as if it were a piece of property whose disposal was entirely her own business: exactly the sort of mad idea that our materialistic society breeds. Whereas the truth is that the self, to the extent that one can speak of such a thing, is in constant flux, one’s expectations from life are in constant evolution, and nothing we do is “our own business” – everything impinges on everything else in the universe.

We needed to rouse ourselves from the sleep of superstition, but in doing so we have collapsed into the narcosis of materialism. And waking from that to the reality of death is a far nastier matter.”

Jonathan

Jonathan

Friday 3rd December 2010 at 6:17 pm

It all re-affirms my faith in my younger self who gave up university to become a bricklayer. I’d have suffocated otherwise in the stifling intellectuissimality of puffed-up egos earning their dosh by spouting crap; or to put it in the language of the building site: “What a bunch of fucking wankers.”

Seems to me Mr Popham is one of those who must sound authoritative and definitive. Who is he, for example, to say that someone who tries to kill themselves has a commodified view of their life? The Romans and the Japanese had cultures thoroughly permeated by a belief in gods, but for them, to take you own life was, in certain circumstances, seen as an act of the purest nobility. Mark Anthony of Brutus: “He was the noblest Roman of them all.” And he’d just topped himself. Might rather have have spoiled Shakespeare’s scheme of things to have Anthony say “What a pity he had a commodified view of life…”
Where is Mr. P’s understanding of the relativity of individual viewpoints, where is the compassion? Hitchens is a clown, and the poor soul who obviously wanted to end her own life had a “mad idea.” Arrogance, Mr. P., and actually rather cruel. You don’t deserve the pulpit of a daily paper.
Or as Charles puts it more concisely, “Tosh!”

What an offensive liberty to dismiss the great advocate and thinker Christopher Hitchens like this! It is cheap belittling by P.Popham to attempt to prove a journalistic point by declaring obsolete the power and perspicacity of Mr. Hitchens – a man who, despite advancing cancer, is clear, unequivocal and both brilliantly and sensibly radical in how he thinks.
If in doubt, try and watch Hitch’s interview with Jeremy Paxman and see if you remain uninfluenced and unmoved by the power of Christopher Hitchens’ beautiful reasoning.